Johannesburg

6 December 2013.

It is a searing hot day in Johannesburg. Gin has returned to the city of her birth to throw a party for her mother's eightieth birthday. She is determined with lists and meals and flower arrangements to show that she has become a fully capable woman. She knows deep down her mother will only ever see a lost cause.

Meanwhile outside crowds of citizens and the world's media have gathered to hear the expected announcement: Nelson Mandela has died.

Set across the course of a single momentous day and narrated by a chorus of voices Fiona Melrose's second novel is a hymn to an extraordinary city and its people an ambitious homage to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and a devastating personal and political manifesto on mothers and daughters justice and love.

'Beautifully observed' Mail on Sunday

'Woolf produced blooms that are impossible to emulate. Johannesburg provides evidence of a novelist who can grow inimitable flowers herself' Spectator